An Android smartphone with a whopping 10 gigabytes of RAM and the latest chipset still couldn’t beat Apple’s iPhone XS Max.
The OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition, as you might expect from the name, is all about speed. Unlike other models of the 6T, the McLaren Edition packs quite a bit more power under the hood.
It boasts Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 SoC and 10GB of memory — likely making it one of the fastest Android smartphones on the market. And yet, Apple’s iPhone XS Max, with just 4GB of RAM, was still able to emerge victorious in a head-to-head speed test.
YouTube channel PhoneBuff pitted both devices against each other in a speed test, opening a series of apps and performing various processor-intensive tasks. As is typical with PhoneBuff, the test was completed with a mechanical arm performing tasks to remove human error. You can watch the entire race below.
The McLaren Edition started out with an early lead but was quickly overtaken by the iPhone XS Max. There were some close calls during the race, but the iPhone XS Max — with six fewer gigs of RAM — manages to beat the special OnePlus device.
It isn’t altogether a surprising result. Apple’s newest smartphones are the fastest on the market, thanks in part to the beastly A12 Bionic chipset that powers them. The A12 boasts performance that is rapidly approaching some of the best desktop CPUs on the market.
But what’s more interesting is that Apple’s devices routinely manage to beat out similar Android flagships that, on paper, appear to sport much better specifications.
This is largely because Apple makes both iOS and the A-series chips. Because of that, the firm is able to fine tune how the hardware and software work in tandem with each other.
To be fair, the OnePlus 6T did extremely well in the test — completing all tasks about one second slower than the iPhone. It fared much better than the standard OnePlus 6T models.
But the fact that OnePlus’s flagship needs 10GB of RAM to keep up with an iPhone just goes to show that Apple’s devices generally do a lot more, with a lot less.